Nationality: United StatesExecutive summary: Missionaries of the Sacred Heart

Maria Francesca Cabrini was the first American to be canonized. Born and raised in Italy, she began teaching in a Codogno orphanage in 1870 when she was 20 years of age. Seven years later she became a nun with the Sisters of Providence, but in 1880, she resigned amidst internal squabbles within the order, and established the Institute of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Under the motto "I can do all things in Him who strengtheneth me" (Philippians 4:13) her new group soon opened schools in Grumello and Milan, and in 1888 she was asked by Pope Leo XIII to bring her mission to Italian immigrants in America. Over subsequent decades Mother Cabrini established schools or orphanages in Brooklyn, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Newark, New Orleans, New York City, Scranton, and Seattle, where she took the oath of American citizenship in 1909. She also opened hospitals in Chicago, Seattle, and New York City, and schools in Argentina, Brazil, England, France, Nicaragua, Panama, and Spain. In 1946, twenty-nine years after her death, she was canonized Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, Heavenly patroness of all emigrants and of displaced persons.